The Prosperity Of Humankind - Part V (idea)

A Statement Prepared by the
Bahá'í International Community's
Office of Public Information

Part V

It is in the context of raising the level of human capacity through
the expansion of knowledge at all levels that the economic issues
facing humankind need to be addressed. As the experience of recent
decades has demonstrated, material benefits and endeavours cannot be
regarded as ends in themselves. Their value consists not only in
providing for humanity's basic needs in housing, food, health care,
and the like, but in extending the reach of human abilities. The most
important role that economic efforts must play in development lies,
therefore, in equipping people and institutions with the means through
which they can achieve the real purpose of development: that is,
laying foundations for a new social order that can cultivate the
limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness.

The challenge to economic thinking is to accept unambiguously this
purpose of development-and its own role in fostering creation of the
means to achieve it. Only in this way can economics and the related
sciences free themselves from the undertow of the materialistic
preoccupations that now distract them, and fulfil their potential as
tools vital to achieving human well-being in the full sense of the
term. Nowhere is the need for a rigorous dialogue between the work of
science and the insights of religion more apparent.

The problem of poverty is a case in point. Proposals aimed at
addressing it are predicated on the conviction that material resources
exist, or can be created by scientific and technological endeavour,
which will alleviate and eventually entirely eradicate this age-old
condition as a feature of human life. A major reason why such relief
is not achieved is that the necessary scientific and technological
advances respond to a set of priorities only tangentially related to
the real interests of the generality of humankind. A radical
reordering of these priorities will be required if the burden of
poverty is finally to be lifted from the world. Such an achievement
demands a determined quest for appropriate values, a quest that will
test profoundly both the spiritual and scientific resources of
humankind. Religion will be severely hampered in contributing to this
joint undertaking so long as it is held prisoner by sectarian
doctrines which cannot distinguish between contentment and mere
passivity and which teach that poverty is an inherent feature of
earthly life, escape from which lies only in the world beyond. To
participate effectively in the struggle to bring material well-being
to humanity, the religious spirit must find -- in the Source of
inspiration from which it flows -- new spiritual concepts and
principles relevant to an age that seeks to establish unity and
justice in human affairs.

Unemployment raises similar issues. In most of contemporary thinking,
the concept of work has been largely reduced to that of gainful
employment aimed at acquiring the means for the consumption of
available goods. The system is circular: acquisition and consumption
resulting in the maintenance and expansion of the production of goods
and, in consequence, in supporting paid employment. Taken
individually, all of these activities are essential to the well-being
of society. The inadequacy of the overall conception, however, can be
read in both the apathy that social commentators discern among large
numbers of the employed in every land and the demoralisation of the
growing armies of the unemployed.

Not surprisingly, therefore, there is increasing recognition that the
world is in urgent need of a new "work ethic". Here again, nothing
less than insights generated by the creative interaction of the
scientific and religious systems of knowledge can produce so
fundamental a reorientation of habits and attitudes. Unlike animals,
which depend for their sustenance on whatever the environment readily
affords, human beings are impelled to express the immense capacities
latent within them through productive work designed to meet their own
needs and those of others. In acting thus they become participants,
at however modest a level, in the processes of the advancement of
civilization. They fulfil purposes that unite them with others. To
the extent that work is consciously undertaken in a spirit of service
to humanity, Bahá'u'lláh says, it is a form of prayer, a
means of worshipping God. Every individual has the capacity to see
himself or herself in this light, and it is to this inalienable
capacity of the self that development strategy must appeal, whatever
the nature of the plans being pursued, whatever the rewards they
promise. No narrower a perspective will ever call up from the people
of the world the magnitude of effort and commitment that the economic
tasks ahead will require.

A challenge of similar nature faces economic thinking as a result of
the environmental crisis. The fallacies in theories based on the
belief that there is no limit to nature's capacity to fulfil any
demand made on it by human beings have now been coldly exposed. A
culture which attaches absolute value to expansion, to acquisition,
and to the satisfaction of people's wants is being compelled to
recognise that such goals are not, by themselves, realistic guides to
policy. Inadequate, too, are approaches to economic issues whose
decision-making tools cannot deal with the fact that most of the major
challenges are global rather than particular in scope.

The earnest hope that this moral crisis can somehow be met by deifying
nature itself is an evidence of the spiritual and intellectual
desperation that the crisis has engendered. Recognition that creation
is an organic whole and that humanity has the responsibility to care
for this whole, welcome as it is, does not represent an influence
which can by itself establish in the consciousness of people a new
system of values. Only a breakthrough in understanding that is
scientific and spiritual in the fullest sense of the terms will
empower the human race to assume the trusteeship toward which history
impels it.

All people will have sooner or later to recover, for example, the
capacity for contentment, the welcoming of moral discipline, and the
devotion to duty that, until relatively recently, were considered
essential aspects of being human. Repeatedly throughout history, the
teachings of the Founders of the great religions have been able to
instil these qualities of character in the mass of people who
responded to them. The qualities themselves are even more vital
today, but their expression must now take a form consistent with
humanity's coming-of-age. Here again, religion's challenge is to free
itself from the obsessions of the past: contentment is not fatalism;
morality has nothing in common with the life-denying puritanism that
has so often presumed to speak in its name; and a genuine devotion to
duty brings feelings not of self-righteousness but of self-worth.

The effect of the persistent denial to women of full equality with men
sharpens still further the challenge to science and religion in the
economic life of humankind. To any objective observer the principle
of the equality of the sexes is fundamental to all realistic thinking
about the future well-being of the earth and its people. It
represents a truth about human nature that has waited largely
unrecognised throughout the long ages of the race's childhood and
adolescence. "Women and men", is Bahá'u'lláh's
emphatic assertion, "have been and will always be equal in the
sight of God." The rational soul has no sex, and whatever social
inequities may have been dictated by the survival requirements of the
past, they clearly cannot be justified at a time when humanity stands
at the threshold of maturity. A commitment to the establishment of
full equality between men and women, in all departments of life and at
every level of society, will be central to the success of efforts to
conceive and implement a strategy of global development.

Indeed, in an important sense, progress in this area will itself be a
measure of the success of any development program. Given the vital
role of economic activity in the advancement of civilization, visible
evidence of the pace at which development is progressing will be the
extent to which women gain access to all avenues of economic
endeavour. The challenge goes beyond ensuring an equitable
distribution of opportunity, important as that is. It calls for a
fundamental rethinking of economic issues in a manner that will invite
the full participation of a range of human experience and insight
hitherto largely excluded from the discourse. The classical economic
models of impersonal markets in which human beings act as autonomous
makers of self-regarding choices will not serve the needs of a world
motivated by ideals of unity and justice. Society will find itself
increasingly challenged to develop new economic models shaped by
insights that arise from a sympathetic understanding of shared
experience, from viewing human beings in relation to others, and from
a recognition of the centrality to social well-being of the role of
the family and the community. Such an intellectual breakthrough --
strongly altruistic rather than self-centred in focus -- must draw
heavily on both the spiritual and scientific sensibilities of the
race, and millennia of experience have prepared women to make crucial
contributions to the common effort.